TV Food: Overserved

Listening to Paula Deen on Food Networkoften transports me back home to my grandmother’skitchen. Her easy laugh is infectious, andher sugary-sweet Southern drawl, peppered with“y’alls” and “sugar,” reminds me of the master cook inmy family who’d won hundreds of blue ribbons in parish fairs.

But there’s where the similarities end. My grandmother nevermade anything close to Paula Deen’s “Lady’s Brunch Burger,”a concoction that would put the Dagwood sandwich toshame. It’s a hamburger, topped with an over-easyfried egg, three slices of bacon, sandwiched betweentwo glazed donuts. Season to taste. This is a womanwho’s given us “Paula’s Fried Butter Balls.”

It’s not just Paula Deen, but chefs all over the dialseem more interested in making meals with catchynames or bizarre ingredients, or they seem to goout of their way to create a dish that’s so decadently outlandishyou might go into cardiac arrest just looking at it.

Moreover, U.S. viewers can’t just watch someone make soup.Every meal now has to be a competition, or a race against theclock or, better yet, both elements are combined in popularculinary game shows. (Think Iron Chef America, Top Chef,Chopped, Throwdown With Bobby Flay) We love a good contest,no matter where it’s held.

Adam Richman, host of Travel Channel’s Man v. Food,serves up the something truly special in a show almost designedto encourage overeating and obesity. Each week hetakes on a local challenge (Suicide Hot Wings Challenge!)to consume a certain tonnage of food, and viewers aretreated to watching him nearly gag on Flintstones-sized sandwiches or gargantuan cuts of bloody beef.

All this might be funny, if it weren’t for epidemic rates of obesity,heart disease and diabetes. Today one in four people dieof heart disease in the U.S., making it the No. 1 killer. In 2010,heart disease will cost the nation $316.4 billion, according to theAmerican Heart Association, a fi gure that includes the cost ofhealth care services, medications, and lost productivity. Likewise,23.6 million children and adults in the United States—nearly 8% of the population—have diabetes, according to theAmerican Diabetes Association.

Our Content story this week detailsthe explosion in popularity of food shows on cableTV, and how we’ve gotten away from simpler showsthat actually teach folks how to cook at home in afrantic, fast-paced world. Ratings are up, but truecooking in viewers’ kitchens is down.

From my recliner, I’ve rarely seen any of the top“talent,” as they effortlessly dice carrots into perfecthalf-inch slices, make mistakes on-air, so viewersare often discouraged from even attempting whatlooks to be a flawless food creation. As the New YorkTimes writer, cook and author Mark Bittman, said ina recent blog, “The home cook, especially the aspiringhome cook, needs encouragement — not befuddlement.”

Perhaps the best guru on the topic is quoted by Janice Littlejohnin this week’s story: “One of the things I preach to people is it’s reallyimportant to cook. It’s important to your health, it’s importantto the farmers and it’s important to your family life — cookingmeals together — and people tell me they don’t have time to cook,”said Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food.

As Pollan pointed out, food companies are persuading Americansto let them do the cooking. The “advances” can be found onsupermarket aisles in “edible, food-like substances — no longerthe products of nature, but of food science” and they are ever sosurely making us unhealthy, he argues. But, said Pollan, “if wewould just take some of that time we’re spending watching peoplecook on TV and just do it, we’d be so much better off .”